Itās not just Sam Altman: AI will ruin PC gaming in ways you donāt expect
Good lord, itās been a bad week for gaming. You donāt need to be a news hound or a Nostradamus to see where the problems are coming from: AI. From hardware to software to platforms to funding, āAIā is causing nothing but headaches for most gamers, and anyone else connected to the industry.
Welcome to the Boost Mode newsletter. Every week I share my insights on PC gaming, desktop setups, and hardware optimization. I also track down some of the most interesting PC and nerd news from around the web, plus a PC game pick you might not have seen elsewhere. Want this newsletter to come directly to your inbox? Sign up on our website!Ā
The billionaires want your RAM
Over a couple of cheeky pints with a fellow CEO, ChatGPTās chief Sam Altman said the quiet part out loud: Your computerās RAM would be far better utilized in one of OpenAIās data centers. He was talking specifically about running AI models ā which is possible to do on local hardware, especially on newer designs like Nvidiaās RTX Spark chips ā but the sentiment follows for gaming PCs and consoles, too.
From Altmanās perspective as a billionaire profiting off the AI boom, yeah, of course all that hardware would be better in his hands, rented back to corporations and consumers one token at a time. The sentiment comes off as unimaginably elitist, even if it makes cold, robotic sense for pure allocation. One of the richest people on the planet thinks he should have powerful hardware, not you.
And that sure seems to be the way the market is trending, with RAM in laptops and phones going backward for the first time in recent memory, even as every new device crows about AI capability. Remember that big push Microsoft had for āCopilot+ā laptops that met a minimum spec, a minimum that its latest (and still very expensive) Surface devices canāt even meet?
Itās kind of ironic that Microsoft is having so much trouble with its Xbox platform. The cheapest Xbox is now $500, and the next-gen āHelixā model is projected to cost $1,200 to $1,800 to produce. Microsoft has been struggling to keep Xbox competitive for over a decade, but itās hard to feel bad for the company thatās also pushing AI in every one of its products, so much that it had to apologize to Windows users.
Pity Sony and Nintendo, at least theoretically, as their price increases are beyond their control. Pity Framework and Valve for trying to make cool hardware at the worst time imaginable. But donāt shed a tear for Microsoft ā it has sewn the wind.
AI slop floods the game platforms
CEOs being out-of-touch elitists isnāt new (here Iāll mention Epic CEO Tim Sweeney for a very specific reason), and weāve been dealing with a nightmare of hardware prices for a year or so. But Steamās recent Next Fest event highlighted how the AI problem is affecting the software side, too.
Next Fest has become a calendar event for gamers, a time when developers and publishers release demos for their exciting upcoming titles. But this year, with Steam absolutely infested with AI slop, things felt a little different. Though there was plenty of new stuff to try for PC gamers. But some developers are now wary of publishing demos, for fear that their games will be used as templates for vibe-coded copycats.
The fears are not unfounded. While shovelware and clones have always been a part of the gaming market, being able to point an LLM at an existing game is a new problem. Itās not as if youāre just slapping the cover into a Xerox machine and getting an instant, perfect copyā¦but itās not so far removed from that, either. Fraudulent copies of games have already appeared on Steam and other platforms, and developers have been sent extortion messages threatening to use AI to copy their games if they donāt pay up. The problem is so widespread that Anthropic added more stringent, game-specific copyright protections to its Claude LLM.
I didn't filter, this is just "recently added"
ā Kenney (@kenney.nl) 2026-11-01T09:36:34.926Z
Steam has moderation tools to stop outright fraud and intentional customer confusion. And Steam, more than other platforms, has at least made token attempts to inform players when generative AI is being used. But Valve has stopped short of allowing end users to filter out projects that are partly or mostly built with generative AI.
Valve is either unwilling or unable to be the slop police. Itās trying to walk a fine line between quality control and developer freedom. On one side, you get a walled garden thatās inaccessi
Good lord, itās been a bad week for gaming. You donāt need to be a news hound or a Nostradamus to see where the problems are coming from: AI. From hardware to software to platforms to funding, āAIā is causing nothing but headaches for most gamers, and anyone else connected to the industry.
Welcome to the Boost Mode newsletter. Every week I share my insights on PC gaming, desktop setups, and hardware optimization. I also track down some of the most interesting PC and nerd news from around the web, plus a PC game pick you might not have seen elsewhere. Want this newsletter to come directly to your inbox? Sign up on our website!Ā
The billionaires want your RAM
Over a couple of cheeky pints with a fellow CEO, ChatGPTās chief Sam Altman said the quiet part out loud: Your computerās RAM would be far better utilized in one of OpenAIās data centers. He was talking specifically about running AI models ā which is possible to do on local hardware, especially on newer designs like Nvidiaās RTX Spark chips ā but the sentiment follows for gaming PCs and consoles, too.
From Altmanās perspective as a billionaire profiting off the AI boom, yeah, of course all that hardware would be better in his hands, rented back to corporations and consumers one token at a time. The sentiment comes off as unimaginably elitist, even if it makes cold, robotic sense for pure allocation. One of the richest people on the planet thinks he should have powerful hardware, not you.
And that sure seems to be the way the market is trending, with RAM in laptops and phones going backward for the first time in recent memory, even as every new device crows about AI capability. Remember that big push Microsoft had for āCopilot+ā laptops that met a minimum spec, a minimum that its latest (and still very expensive) Surface devices canāt even meet?
Itās kind of ironic that Microsoft is having so much trouble with its Xbox platform. The cheapest Xbox is now $500, and the next-gen āHelixā model is projected to cost $1,200 to $1,800 to produce. Microsoft has been struggling to keep Xbox competitive for over a decade, but itās hard to feel bad for the company thatās also pushing AI in every one of its products, so much that it had to apologize to Windows users.
Pity Sony and Nintendo, at least theoretically, as their price increases are beyond their control. Pity Framework and Valve for trying to make cool hardware at the worst time imaginable. But donāt shed a tear for Microsoft ā it has sewn the wind.
AI slop floods the game platforms
CEOs being out-of-touch elitists isnāt new (here Iāll mention Epic CEO Tim Sweeney for a very specific reason), and weāve been dealing with a nightmare of hardware prices for a year or so. But Steamās recent Next Fest event highlighted how the AI problem is affecting the software side, too.
Next Fest has become a calendar event for gamers, a time when developers and publishers release demos for their exciting upcoming titles. But this year, with Steam absolutely infested with AI slop, things felt a little different. Though there was plenty of new stuff to try for PC gamers. But some developers are now wary of publishing demos, for fear that their games will be used as templates for vibe-coded copycats.
The fears are not unfounded. While shovelware and clones have always been a part of the gaming market, being able to point an LLM at an existing game is a new problem. Itās not as if youāre just slapping the cover into a Xerox machine and getting an instant, perfect copyā¦but itās not so far removed from that, either. Fraudulent copies of games have already appeared on Steam and other platforms, and developers have been sent extortion messages threatening to use AI to copy their games if they donāt pay up. The problem is so widespread that Anthropic added more stringent, game-specific copyright protections to its Claude LLM.
I didn't filter, this is just "recently added"
ā Kenney (@kenney.nl) 2026-11-01T09:36:34.926Z
Steam has moderation tools to stop outright fraud and intentional customer confusion. And Steam, more than other platforms, has at least made token attempts to inform players when generative AI is being used. But Valve has stopped short of allowing end users to filter out projects that are partly or mostly built with generative AI.
Valve is either unwilling or unable to be the slop police. Itās trying to walk a fine line between quality control and developer freedom. On one side, you get a walled garden thatās inaccessi